The recent festival of music by the Second Viennese School had its moments, writes Michael Dervan

The weekend's concerts, promoted by RTÉ Music, of the work of the Second Viennese School were a fascinating and sometimes disorienting experience. It was good to see RTÉ branching out, at this late stage, to embrace the music of composers who have been, by and large, treated as pariahs in the station's programming. Part of the novelty, of the sense of rehabilitation, stems from the fact that RTÉ, the only organisation in the State with the resources to programme the larger pieces, has for so long treated most of the work of these composers as if they have been on a banned list.

In Gerhard Markson, principal conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra, RTÉ now has direct access to a man whose musically patient working methods bring pieces as diverse as Schoenberg's 1909 expressionist monodrama Erwartung and the 12-tone Variations For Orchestra of two decades later into clear focus - both works were heard in the opening concert by the National Symphony Orchestra.

He also found the right vein of the fantastical in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, a work that, with its surreal atmosphere, was a huge success for the often-maligned composer at its 1912 premiere, in Berlin. The soprano Virginia Kerr's contribution to Erwartung exhibited a sort of wound-up reckless commitment that used to be appreciated for its modernising gloss in a wide range of 20th-century music. In Erwartung it rather flattened out the expressive content, and her emphatic i-dotting and t-crossing in Pierrot Lunaire, at the National Gallery on Saturday afternoon, brought to mind the not quite appropriate mood of a bedtime fairy tale. The Austrian violinist Ernst Kovacic's performance of Berg's Violin Concerto, in the opening concert, was at the opposite pole to Kerr's Erwartung. His fervent playing presented the Berg as if he felt it to be the last great Romantic concerto. With sympathetic support from Markson, it's a representation the piece bears easily and persuasively.

The Serbian pianist Aleksandar Madzar offered a valuable survey of the piano music of the three composers, showing in Berg's Sonata, Op 1 a grasp of the harmonic language that eludes those many performers who choose the easier route of concentrating on its linear content. The mastery of his handling of Schoenberg's Five Pieces, Op 23, the pieces that effectively unlocked the compositional barrier the composer had struggled with for more than a decade, was typical of a recital that was at all times illuminating.

The RTÉ Concert Orchestra's single contribution to the weekend was disappointing. Lynda Lee was an able but mechanical soloist in Berg's Seven Early Songs, creating a duller impression in this music than I would ever have imagined possible.

The Songs From Prison of the Irish composer Frederick May, featuring the Norwegian baritone Tom Erik Lie, showed more the influence of his studies in London than Vienna, and seemed out of place in this programme. Under Proinnsías Ó Duinn, the works by Webern (Variations, Op 30) and Schoenberg (First Chamber Symphony) lacked the technical finish and communicative spirit that had informed the NSO's playing under Markson.

It was a nice idea for the RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet to include Beethoven's Grosse Fuge in the same programme as a Schoenberg string quartet. The affinity between Beethoven and Schoenberg is here at its highest, with ideas taken fully to their limit, no matter how uncompromising the density that results. The performance of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, with Patricia Rozario delivering the Stefan George settings of the last two movements, somehow failed to find the right tone for this seminal work. The performance was, in a sense, the opposite of Madzar in Berg, the linear predominating at the expense of the vertical, and the work sounding weaker as a result.

In the context of what was clearly intended by RTÉ as a ground-breaking weekend, the final concert seemed a failure of nerve. Markson conducted the NSO in a programme of Mozart (the overture from The Marriage Of Figaro), Webern (the early, atypical Im Sommerwind), Haydn (Surprise Symphony), Schoenberg (the early, atypical Notturno), and Brahms (Haydn Variations). Sadly, the Webern failed to cohere in Markson's kid-gloves account, and the Schoenberg seemed nothing more than a trifle.

The ambivalent commitment of the programming of this concert was felt also in some of the weekend's talks, which can only have resulted in a confusing message to any inquiring neophytes. Michael Taylor offered the most interesting and provocative contributions, and the resulting debate, delving into the finer points of aesthetics and the writings of Theodor Adorno, showed a welcome potential, should RTÉ ever wish to consider building on it.

It was unfortunate that the talks as a whole, which could have done so much to enliven the sort of debate the weekend was intended to foster, resulted in so many clichés, both of number-crunching in tone rows and what amounted to glib assertions of strongly held prejudice.

The good news, though, is that there is an audience for this music. The National Gallery was packed for Pierrot Lunaire, and the opening concert attracted 25 per cent more listeners to the NCH than the RTÉCO's programme of Puccini, Beethoven, Bach, Rossini, Ravel and Delibes the previous Wednesday. There's a message of some sort there, if only RTÉ will pay heed to it.